


Truth; Beauty

by kvikindi



Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types, Les Misérables - Victor Hugo
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-18
Updated: 2014-02-18
Packaged: 2018-01-12 22:02:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,380
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1202179
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kvikindi/pseuds/kvikindi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which Prouvaire proves to be the worst Greek teacher in the world, and Feuilly as a student is equally challenging-- but in spite of this, they find themselves exploring the ambiguities of love, in addition to the question of how to keep plants from dying.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Truth; Beauty

1826

* * *

 Prouvaire calls him, at first, The Owl-- for when he comes to meetings, he perches at the back of the room and never speaks. Too, because he proves to have wire spectacles, which he squints through and pushes up his nose when he reads. This gives him an owlish look, and his heavy dark hair tufts up when he pushes his hands through it agitatedly. When The Owl is revealed as a worker, Prouvaire, with delight, alters his name to _L'Hibouvrier_ : The Owl-Worker. It is a long time before they know his name, any of the Amis, because he darts in and out like he is in fact some feathered creature, never staying to drink or talk about Courfeyrac's amours or the opening of the latest Hugo play. 

 Once Prouvaire jostles against him, causing him to drop his papers as he-- there is no other word for it-- scuttles away. Prouvaire helps him collect them, one sheet at a time. The writing across them is broad and awkward.

 "Little owl," Prouvaire says, "where are you flying so fast?"

  _L'Hibouvrier_ flinches, looks sullen. "Nowhere. That is--"

 It is almost winter. The two of them stand in the doorway of the Musain, half in and half out of the cafe. Evening is unfolding like a night-blooming flower, one petal at a time, over-fragrancing the day, and inside men jostle around the lit lamps. We are moths, Prouvaire thinks, but we are also flames, and he marks down the image for some future poem: each man is a flame that is also a moth, a moth that carries its own flame; or perhaps a piece of the same flame is in every moth.

 He says, "Do you realize that none of us knows your name?"

 "That is, I--" There are the hair-tufts, pushing up under the cap, like little owl-crests. "It is Feuilly."

 "Feuilly. Marvelous. Feuilly, do you like ice?"

 Feuilly blinks. 

 "I like ice. The air smells like ice. Here is what I think: I think that somewhere, far north of here, in unmapped regions, in that indescribable place which the Romans called Thule, and that no one since has discovered, some continent of ice is moving at a very slow pace, and it will at one point overtake us, and every so often the wind shifts and bears of a trace of the strange ice that is in that kingdom. This makes my soul lonely. I long for the future. What do you think?"

 Feuilly stares at him. His mouth drops a little open. He says uncertainly, "I think you may be mad."

 "It is certainly possible." Prouvaire hands him back the last of the papers. "However, what is possible does not interest me. I am only interested in the impossible."

 "That cannot be very satisfying."

 "No. Satisfaction is not mine to enjoy. Therefore, I am melancholy." He sighs, and affects a melancholic expression.

 "I am sorry to hear it," Feuilly says.

 "Thank you. I can see you have a feeling soul."

 Feuilly presses his lips together and looks away, his eyes perceptibly brightening. He is laughing, Prouvaire thinks, without making a sound. He is laughing with his whole body. 

 Impulsively, he says, "You are not an owl. I am so, so sorry. I don't know what you are yet. Something warm."

 "Not from the ice kingdom?" Again, that silent laughter.

 "No. Nor me. We are summer creatures."

 "What will happen to us, then, in your ice-future?"

 "I do not know. I never said the ice-future would be easy."

 They stand there, staring at one another. Outside, a 'bus passes. A cart-horse clip-clops. Somewhere a parish bell rings. A great wind comes and sweeps the cobbles, and for a moment everything is in motion: gutter-dust airborne, skeletal leaves ambulant, summoned to life once more. It is an animating wind, Prouvaire thinks, and on a whim he reaches into his pocket to bring out a branch of early yew berries. He tucks it behind Feuilly's ear. He says, "For safekeeping."

 Feuilly touches the berries, but doesn't comment. He says, "I will see you next week?"

 "Every week. Until the future."

 Prouvaire watches him walk down the street: slightly hunched, quick and small, a strange creature of Paris. Perhaps he is one of those for whom there exist no animal corollary. Or it exists somewhere, out in the wild, in the jungles or the sea, but it has never yet been seen by man and perhaps never will be. Prouvaire thinks of himself as such an animal. I am rare, he thinks. He does not mean it as a compliment. It is a description, the factual state of things. He sees Combeferre's sketches of specimens-- a saber-toothed deer, a pale white peacock, a bird that seems to lack any wings. These are more like him than any man. Their unlikeness is their likeness, their shared category. 

* * *

 At the Friends' next meeting, Feuilly slips to him a small folded object. Prouvaire, unfolding it, finds it to be a ladies' fan-- the cheap paper kind. Painted across it is a landscape of cliffs and sea, each curled wave comprising a little flourish, and black ink outlining seagulls' wings. Out in the distance a blue-white ice-shelf approaches. Prouvaire sees an alarmed whale poking its head above water, a walrus with its eyes bulging. He laughs aloud.

 "Did you paint this?" he asks Feuilly, after.

 Feuilly flushes and looks uncomfortable. He jams his hands in his worn-through pockets. "Well, I am no artist. It is only a scene."

 "It's marvelous! The little animals, at the apocalypse."

 "I wanted to draw you as well, standing on the cliffs, looking pleased," Feuilly says. "But I could not think how to do it."

 Prouvaire tilts his head. "What do you mean?"

 "You are too complex," Feuilly says, by way of explanation. He has a way of talking with his two hands up, as though he is fighting while speaking. "You are too much in motion. I have the sense that something inside of you is always shifting."

 "Hmm." Prouvaire considers this.

 "You would be a blur. Seen from a distance, in a single moment, I mean."

 "I am not sure I entirely like this assessment."

 "I cannot help that."

 "No, I see." He is still thinking. "I long for stillness," he says, "but I have no gift for it. And you?"

 "Me?"

 "Yes: how would you paint yourself?"

 A kind of stiffness enters Feuilly's face. "I would not paint myself," he says curtly, squaring his shoulders. "Why should I? I am ordinary."

* * *

 But he is not ordinary. With prompting, he begins to speak at meetings, and reveals a fluent grasp of European history. He can correct even Enjolras on names, dates, statistics; and he does so with an urgency that takes them all aback, till Courfeyrac laughs over the mixing-up of two Polish kings-- "Władysław this and Stanisław that; come now, you cannot really be cross with me!"-- and Feuilly, for the first time, reduces the room to silence. "It may not matter to you, M. Courfeyrac, or to anyone else in this country, but men fought and died under these kings. Good men, who left behind no history; whose children lived and died and are not remembered, because they were poor and foreign, because we merit them no remembering. If we cannot know their names, we can at least know their nations-- their wars, their provinces, their numbers, their kings. It is a very weak way to honor them, I acknowledge, so perhaps you can manage that at _least!_ " 

 After that, Courfeyrac is more careful, and insists: "Do not _monsieur_ me!" Still, there are occasional explosions, when a reference to the "peasant mindset" and its practicality, or to the working classes' need for enlightenment, provokes a brittle and erudite tirade. "Are we your children, that you should speak so? Are we virginal girls, before our wedding day, waiting to be fucked by the masters of nations? We are men like you, with no lesser complexity, with no lesser capacity of comprehension. We do not think alike, nor believe alike; only you do not perceive our diversity. Am I not a worker, that I stand here with you? And if I am not, then who is a worker?"

 That requires Enjolras' intervention: Enjolras, whom alone Feuilly seems not to distrust, Enjolras, who is somehow above the matrix of trusting and distrusting. Enjolras, cool and radiant, who touches Feuilly on the shoulder, and takes him aside to discuss higher things. (Prouvaire is aware of the jealousy in his observation. He himself is wholly trivial, he believes; in a room with Enjolras, he is conscious of his low mind, his dreaminess, his distractibility.)

 You would think from this that Feuilly would not be well-liked, but in fact it is difficult to not like Feuilly. Once you have made him laugh, you long to repeat this achievement. It is not that he seems unhappy, but only that he has the sense of a locked box, inside of which is some beautiful thing that you glimpse only briefly, on certain occasions. On holidays and feasts. It is an enticement Prouvaire finds hard to resist. He is not the only one, he thinks.

* * *

 Feuilly reveals himself also as well-read. He can quote at length from Robespierre and Rousseau, from Cicero and Plato-- though the latter only in French, not in the Latin or Greek. When he mentions Aristotle on one summer evening, Prouvaire says contemplatively, "You haven't any Greek, have you? I could teach you, if you like."

 Again that tightness, that wariness. "I don't need your tutoring."

 "I am quite sure you do not; you have twice my intellect. Nevertheless, I am offering."

 Feuilly hesitates. "I--"

 "You cannot think of any excuses. I have bewitched you so that they will all flee."

 "I am a rationalist."

 "That is no force against bewitchment."

 Feuilly spreads his hands in mock-surrender. "It would appear I am entrapped."

 "No," Prouvaire says. He touches those hands: palm-to-palm, the lightest of touches. "You are free. I am asking you freely, in your freedom, if you would freely devote your time to me, so that I may show you the freedom of the language in which men learned first to be free."

 Feuilly holds very still, like a startled animal. "You speak of freedom," he points out, "but you ask for devotion. Which is it to be?"

 "Find out," Prouvaire suggests. In a lightning-fast movement, he ducks to press a kiss against Feuilly's cheek. Then darts off again, half-breathless with laughter, half-giddy with daring. 

* * *

 And so the Greek lessons begin on a Sunday in August, when the air is almost flat and Prouvaire has flung open the windows, trying to stir up a hint of a breeze. He can smell horse-sweat, and stagnant water, and sour fruit; somewhere, smoke is rising from a brasserie. Soon, at least, the night will overlay these aromas, rolling in with cooler air from the country, with slow blue reminders of something respirable, of a world beyond the rooftops where men may breathe. At night in the summer, Prouvaire misses Provence: the real cool, the sea smell, the grassy living things that whispered at dusk, alive with insects. Birds flocking in the dark. That is the real world, he thinks; here, we are all shadows in firelight.

 Feuilly knocks while Prouvaire is arranging lilies. They are half-wilted and give off little scent. He leaves them to answer the door, and they droop over their vase.

 "Hello," he says.

 "Hello," Feuilly says. He looks recalcitrant. His cravat is rumpled, and his waistcoat half-buttoned.

 "Thank you for coming." Prouvaire steps aside to let him in. He crosses the room to light a candle. When he turns, Feuilly is looking: around the room, at the jumble of objects. Prouvaire ignores them, ordinarily. He is not like Combeferre, with his cases of moths, all lined up by genus and species, with little notes in his careful script. Prouvaire disdains such ordering. Instead, he has a divan in the corner, piled high with various musical things: a lute, and a drum, and a Turkish violin, and flutes in various sizes and shapes. A mysterious curtain is draped above them, printed with peacock feathers and things. And then, in the corner, a Japanese gong, and a suit of armor, and several sabers, and a large painting of a cassowary; and in the other corner, an Oriental rug spread on the floor, and ceramic pots filled with plants progressing towards decease. It all looks, somehow, a little haphazard. Prouvaire hastily shoves a stray shirt under a sopha, kicks a waistcoat under a bookshelf, smiles winningly. "I have more candles," he offers. "If it's too dark."

 Feuilly says, "You have so many _things_." There is no tone in his voice that Prouvaire can recognize.

 "I know," Prouvaire says. "It's terrible, really. I just see something I love, and I want to own it. Just to, sort of, you know, keep it with me. I can't bear to think of there being things that I love and can't have. That sounds awful. I am actually an awful person. Perhaps you knew that. Sorry." He sits down heavily in an upholstered chair. "Shall I tell you about Greek?"

 Feuilly stares at him as though he is quite insane. But he sits-- eventually, taking his cap off and squashing it in one hand, perching on the edge of the chair as though about to leave.

 "You might as well settle. We will be here for a while," Prouvaire tells him. "Now: have you had any languages previously?"

 Feuilly has not previously had any languages. He is unfamiliar with the declensions of nouns, the conjugations of verbs, and yet he understands instinctively the nature of syntax: its patterns, its reasons. He asks questions that Prouvaire cannot answer: if the word ἐκ mostly means from-- and this sense he understands, having observed its operation in descendant words and learned Latin expressions: _ex nihilo, ex parte_ \-- but not always, and sometimes indicates a sense of direction that does not quite strike us the same way-- can we know that words like ἐλευθερία and νόμος do not have the same property? How do words attain their meaning at all? Is meaning fixed, or fluctuating; and if it fluctuates, then how can it _mean?_ "

 "I do not know!" Prouvaire says in irritation. "I am not interested. You will not need this in order to learn Greek."

 "You are tired of me. You are tired of my questions. I knew that you would be." Feuilly leans back, crossing his arms over his chest, digging his boot-heels in the carpet, aggressive. "No one said that you had to do this."

 "I am not tired of you! Oh, hell." Prouvaire stands abruptly. "I am going to lie on my Oriental carpet," he announces. "This is an act that relaxes me, and allows me to contemplate the smallness of my troubles when compared to my impending death."

 He toes off his shoes and lies face-up on the carpet. It is indeed relaxing. The air is cooler. He closes his eyes. He lets himself think of ancient Greece, a place where no one had invented questions about grammar, a place where the primary concern was poetry. The methods of art, not the mechanics of language. He pictures white temples. He breathes deeply.

 A floorboard creaks.

 "Shall I go?" Feuilly asks. His voice is atypically uncertain.

 "No. You must not. In fact, I forbid it. In a short while I am going to make an apology. Until then, you may do whatever you like. If lutes do not interest you, you may find a book to read." He waves an imperious, distracted arm.

 For a while, all is silence, and Prouvaire's thoughts drift. He envisions a map of the Hellenic isles, their raw cliffs against the wine-dark sea, sunlight flattening and gilding the water, and then his thoughts turn to ice and mortality. He thinks about death for a while, and feels much better. He stretches and yawns. When he sits up, he sees Feuilly reading by the light of a candle. The light sets a sort of Byzantine aurora over him, burnishing the dark skin of his cheeks, and shadows collect in the folds of his shirt. He is so still, so in himself and so unguarded, that it is as though he were asleep.

 "I'm sorry," Prouvaire says. "I lose my temper. It's not you, at all. It's me."

 Feuilly looks at him. He is wearing his spectacles; they make him look vulnerable, and give him an unreadability. "Should I come back, then?"

 "Will you? I mean, you needn't leave now. I will make a list of words for you to practice. And I haven't anything to drink, but I will next time-- if you will give me the gift of your time."

 Feuilly removes his spectacles and folds them up. "I am not convinced," he says wryly, "that you would not like to set me beside your suit of armor."

 "Of course I would."

 "And then immediately forget about me."

 "That is a very wrong way of thinking about it. And anyway, people are too mobile, and they eat a lot, and they are always needing other things. It is very inconvenient; they want to love you back. No; I think you should just come back next week." Prouvaire smiles very winningly to cover his nervousness. He is always nervous when asking people things. This is the other pleasing aspect of objects: they accept your love so easily. People require articulation. They require reasons.

 But: "All right," Feuilly says. 

 "All right?"

 "All right."

* * *

 They settle into a pattern: Feuilly shows up for lessons, and they read Herodotus, paragraph by paragraph, from parts of the _Histories_. They talk very reasonably about grammar-- the aorist aspect and its uses ("It is very like the _passé défini!_ " "The what?" ** _)_** , particles generally, articles accompanied and unaccompanied by adjectives. At some point in the conversation, Feuilly waxes theoretical. This causes Prouvaire to become angry, because he is bored and cross that he does not understand. Feuilly disregards this, and continues with his questions until Prouvaire becomes so angry that he must go and lie on his Oriental rug. He cools his temper there-- sometimes viciously plucking a lute-- while Feuilly, at the writing-desk, reads peaceably. 

 "What are you reading?" Prouvaire asks once.

 Feuilly shows him: a translation of the _Odyssey_. "I have never had time for poetry," he explains. "There was always too much I needed to know."

 "You need to know poetry," Prouvaire says, appalled, and sends him home with the _Divina Commedia._  

 "It was all right," Feuilly says next week. "I still don't believe in Hell, or any of it."

 "Hell," Prouvaire says grandly, "does not require your belief."

* * *

 Feuilly says idly, "Your plants are dying, you know."

 "I know. They do it to spite me." Prouvaire looks up from his Oriental carpet. He scowls as an orchid drops a leaf.

 "They do not. They require both water and sunlight. Have you not bothered to read about husbandry?"

 "It confuses me. They always look like they need water, and I feel sorry for them. I tried to move them out of the heat."

 "They need the heat, and now it is well into autumn."

 So it is. The city is changing. Now it is dark when Feuilly arrives; Prouvaire's room is full of candles. He lights them profligately. He likes seeing Feuilly laugh in candlelight. The two of them put their heads together over the Greek, peering at the smaller letters. Feuilly smells like ash and and paper and ink. Prouvaire offers him apples, wine, and bread. They eat in the shadows, and argue about poetry.

 Prouvaire moves the plants, and hardens his heart. They brighten a little. A gold pansy blooms at the beginning of November. Prouvaire cuts it, and keeps it, and pins it to Feuilly's coat.  He says, "For further safekeeping." 

* * *

 He falls asleep on the Oriental carpet during one of their lessons. This is early in December, and when he wakes, the fire in the hearth is dwindling. Someone has covered him with a blanket. He pries himself up, groggy and squint-eyed. It is cold, and dark, and there is frost on the windows, and for a second he feels very lonely-- as though he had not quite expected to wake by himself.

 When he goes to the writing-desk, intending to snuff the candle, he sees a very curious thing. His desk has been cleared, and three fans left on it: folded and tied very neatly. As he opens them up, one by one, careful with the paper and string, he sees that they are celestial realms: Paradiso, Inferno, Purgatorio. Feuilly has drawn the exact maps from Dante, embroidered here and there with creative suggestions as to what places Charles X and Villèle might occupy, along with Prince Henry of Prussia, and whoever is responsible for the invention of the aorist aspect in Greek. On the fan that represents Paradiso, in the Primum Mobile, he has painted all of the Friends (save himself) as little angels. When Prouvaire looks close, he can see his own likeness: a blurry red-headed angel with lopsided wings, saying, _I am bored & wish to go to Hell & I think to take everyone with me_.

 He curls up in his chair and laughs and laughs. Then all at once he is not laughing, because he has never owned objects so precious before, and for all his talk of safekeeping, he has no idea of how to protect them. They are small and perishable; so, so fragile. They are only made of paper and ink.  What if someone were to steal them, or to destroy them? What if _he_ destroyed them, carelessly, since he is careless, unkind, a distractible creature? _Why_ , he thinks in a panic, _why would you do this? Why would you give them to me?_

 He has never before known that happiness could be so frightening. 

* * *

At Christmas the Friends go home to their fathers. But first they meet at the Corinthe, where even Father Houcheloup has surrendered to the festive season, and decorated with holly and cedar branches. Courfeyrac, who for reasons unknown has let Joly and Lesgle tie a number of bright red ribbons round his head, runs from Friend to Friend and presses smacking kisses on them. "Merry Christmas!" he cries. Even Feuilly cannot escape him, though he pushes him off, laughing: "M. de Courfeyrac, you are drunk."

 "You will have no Christmas present if you call me 'M. de Courfeyrac' again," Courfeyrac says mock-severely, and lands one more loud kiss on his forehead.

 In truth, there are not a great number of Christmas presents. It seems somehow inappropriate amongst the Friends, who-- anyway-- share almost all they have. There is good wine, to which none of them is really accustomed, and candied walnuts, and _marrons glacés_ , and they talk animatedly about plans for the new year. Combeferre wants to start a school for the fish-market children, and bribe the students with something to eat. "The trouble," he says, "is what to teach them. The Bible, of course; but what if their parents object? They are not all peasants from Picardy. And furthermore, what if _I_ object?"

 "The Declaration of the Rights of Man," Enjolras says, as though it should be obvious.

 Combeferre frowns. "Rather abstract, surely. The Bible at least has violent deaths. Children like that sort of thing."

 "Should we teach them that Moses struck water from a rock, and parted the Red Sea?" Bahorel asks. His face suggests that he is, as usual, contemplating blasphemy.

 "Why not?" Feuilly asks.

 They look at him in surprise. Feuilly is well-known for objecting to even harmless superstitions, for demolishing the stranger of Joly's medical theories, for sending Prouvaire into sulks over spiritualism. 

 "...I only mean," he continues, clearly uncomfortable in the silence, "that when you talk of the Rights of Man, and of the Citizen, you are talking of no more miraculous a thing, to these children, as though a man struck water from a rock. To tell them that their lives have dignity, have worth, is like telling them that someone may part a sea; and yet we ask them to accept it, not to laugh at the notion. Perhaps we should prepare them for miracles."

 "Hear, hear," Courfeyrac says, tapping his glass. The clear sound is like a tocsin, the way it rings throughout the room, and Prouvaire thinks suddenly, _We will make a revolution._ It is the first time he has really believed. The thought is too large for the bones of his chest, and he finds all at once that he can't quite breathe. 

 He goes to the window and leans against it. His mouth fogs the glass. Outside, he can see candles lit in the windows of Paris, smoke rising white from chimneys, a glimmer here and there of moonlight on cobbles, where water has frozen incompletely. What a strange place, he thinks, where there is no sky, and you look for the moon in the street, but perhaps this too is a miracle. 

 Someone touches his arm. Prouvaire finds that, without looking, he can tell that it is Feuilly-- solely by the shape of the touch: hesitant, half-forceful, half-questioning. He turns.

 Feuilly says, "Have I offended you?" 

 "No! No, I--" Prouvaire pushes his hair back. he does not know what he is feeling. "I have a Christmas gift for you. Or rather, I will have. I do not have it yet. You must wait till January. Do not try to tell me you cannot accept it; I will break your window and leave it at your bedside while you sleep."

 Feuilly laughs, that same suppressed little motion. "That would make you a criminal."

 "I am very dangerous and have a criminal mindset. It is well-known; ask anybody." His mood changes. He leans back towards the window. "If you are staying in Paris, will you see your family?"

 "I haven't any."

 "You mean you are deeply estranged?"

 "No. I haven't any family." He is so straightforward and matter-of-fact that it is hard to comprehend what he's saying. "My parents died, and I had no sisters or brothers."

 "I'm sorry." Prouvaire looks at him carefully, trying to read his expression. It resists reading. There is no 'it;' there is just and simply Feuilly, who is slightly rumpled and smells of wine, who has an ink-stain on his sleeve, who has an accent in Greek that Prouvaire cannot place, and that perhaps is his alone. He says, "I think that you are an animal that changes. You are all animals, interchangeably. There is a Sufi story about that; I must remember to tell you. Or not about that, exactly."

 Feuilly frowns, but the type of frown that means he is smiling. He takes Prouvaire's hands. "You've had too much to drink."

 "And you didn't paint yourself as an angel because you are all the angels. You are the one who is painting, and so you see the way that you yourself are in each angel. And-- " Before he can stop himself, he leans quickly forwards and kisses Feuilly: not on the cheek, but on the lips: a brief collision of breath and breath. "And that is for safekeeping."

 It is a marvel that no one else has noticed, that somehow no one sees what must be the most earthshaking events in the world: how Feuilly's face goes red, a kind of darker shade of dusky, and how he slips his hands from Prouvaire's to touch Prouvaire's waistcoat, just the gentlest form of embracing, as though he is not embracing at all, but taking certain measurements: is your heart large enough, have you the capacity? In return, Prouvaire cradles his face for a moment; smooths a stray curl of hair back from his cheek. "I have to go," he says. "I'll see you in January."

 "All right," Feuilly says.

 "All right?"

 "All right."

 Always, this negotiating. 

* * *

 What Prouvaire brings from Provence is dried sage, and artemisia, and a fistful of black stones smoothed flat by the sea. All of it is redolent of other places, of hotter climates. It is the smell of Rome, Prouvaire thinks; or not of Rome, but of the Republic: an older Rome, a Rome yet to come. A city that they are building. "Someday," he says to Feuilly, "you will come to Provence. Sometimes the farmers there still find pottery that the Romans buried, or that went to ruin. The fields grow over it. If you lie very, very still at night, you can hear history, like the tide rolling or the birds migrating. Turning in the earth. Like the past is just a seed. Or a bulb, maybe; I am no botanist. We have established that."

 In fact, his plants are flourishing.

 "I have never been farther than Lyon," Feuilly says. "I was born there." 

 "I could not paint you a scene. And I thought, well, you have no high opinion of poets. But I could bring you these."

 They sit there, uncomfortable, at Prouvaire's desk. Their bodies are full of hesitation. 

 "Thank you," Feuilly says at last. He has that funny strained tone in his voice, an emotion that Prouvaire can never quite read.

 "I didn't--"

 "I don't--"

 They clear their throats.

 Feuilly says, "I don't want you to get the impression-- that is, I am not _Greek_."

 Prouvaire frowns. "I did not ask you that."

 "No, but--"

 "So, but-- oh, I see. No; I do not object to the notion; in fact I myself have practiced it more-or-less enthusiastically; but I do not see why it should make any difference. I mean, if you desired it, I should declare myself ready. But in fact... I am not that kind of animal, I suppose."

 "No," Feuilly says in a rush, "nor me. I do not--" He seems to physically force words from his mouth. "I do not know what sort of animal I am, and in fact I think-- sometimes I think-- that I may not be an animal like other men. I do not know if you know what I mean."

 He doesn't look up. But Prouvaire reaches out to touch him, tracing the line of his jawbone, his cheek-- not to comfort, but because he finds him beautiful. "Can I tell you a story?"

 "Is it a poetic story?" A hint of wry laughter.

 "Yes, but you must listen anyway."

 "You are a tyrant, and you have always been a tyrant. I should have revolted against you."

 "Well, you can revolt against me later. For now, here is my story: once upon a time, at the beginning of time, there were one hundred and fifty birds. Oh, or maybe it was fifty. Or possibly fewer. It is a pun, I think; but not in the French. At any rate, there were birds, and each one was in love with the most glorious bird that they had seen: the _simurgh_ , which is the king of birds, but not a tyrannical sort of king. So they went in search of it, and some of the birds got lost, and others were too lazy, and they had other difficulties that I have forgotten. Eventually they came to the land where the _simurgh_ lived, and by then there were only a few birds, but everywhere they looked they saw only emptiness. They could not find anything that looked like the _simurgh_. And each one thought, _What shall I do with my love? I have so much love, and nothing to give it to!_ But then they came to a lake, or a sea, or a pond-- I cannot remember; something reflective-- and, bending to drink, saw their own reflection, and saw that their reflection was that of the _simurgh_. The bird that they had loved was themselves, when lost together; what they had sought after could not be theirs alone, nor they belong to it. They had to lose themselves in love, without possession. The love that they sought was not the love of separate bodies, but the love of souls, which are boundary-less, which are droplets of water within a sea." Prouvaire pauses, feeling he has made his point, yet feeling also that he cannot make his point, that he is mindlessly gesturing, a kind of interpretive act that has no conclusion. 

 He looks at Feuilly and sees longing. Not the object of his longing, nor longing for him, but a longing that mirrors his.

 "I never feel that I fully understand you," Feuilly confesses. "I am imperfect."

 "I do not fully understand myself-- or you. But I refuse to admit imperfection; call it another sort of aspect. Aorist, maybe."

 Feuilly groans. "I was being serious."

 "Well; as was I." But he lets his smile fade. "Is it enough to say that you will come to Provence, after the revolution, and we will throw stones in the ocean and hunt for Roman pottery? It will be warm all the time. A place for summer creatures."

 "You always speak in terms of immeasurable time; it is intensely irritating to me. How far away is after the revolution? How do you know who you will be, and who I will be, and if we will live?"

 "Would you prefer I said next week? Next week you will come to my rooms, and we will argue about Greek, and you will tell me that it is no use having a brain if I waste it on metaphysical things, and I will get exasperated and possibly fling a hat at you, and then go off for a while to think on my rug, and you will read from the _Odyssey_. Is it still the _Odyssey_ , by the way?"

 "Yes," Feuilly says. "I fear what will happen when he gets home. I am putting it off with slow reading."

 "Then that is what will happen, till the revolution comes, or till you finish the _Odyssey_. All right?"

 "All right," Feuilly says slowly.

 They return to silence. Prouvaire is conscious of snow falling, but it seems somehow very far away. Outside there is this white-and-gray world. It has a bone-like quality. But here, indoors, is the living part of the world, the perishable part that bleeds. "Sometimes I think," he says, "that I used to learn languages because I thought that eventually there would be names for things I wanted and didn't know how to say I wanted, that I felt but didn't quite know how to think."

 "Yes," Feuilly says, and there is that longing. "Some secret, somewhere, locked away in a book you could not read." 

 "But it never happened. They became more mystifying."

 "But at least then you knew how to read." He raises an eyebrow, a faintly bitter expression.

 "But at least I knew there were people in the world who felt the same thing," Prouvaire counters. "Other birds, traveling together."

 "Even if they sometimes throw hats at one another?"

 "You are fortunate that I have thrown nothing larger."

 "Am I so difficult?" He asks the question in jest, but Prouvaire can see him digging his heels in, as he had done at their first meeting. An odd reflex, halfway between fleeing and defending; the fierce little owl, rattling his wings.

 Prouvaire says, "You are the miracle that you talk about. I don't mean practically. Just, when I look at you I don't know how you have happened. You are all strange edges, fitting haphazardly, but then at the end making a rose, or a cathedral. I don't understand the mechanism. I don't know how you accomplish it. So, yes: difficult, but like a concerto is difficult, or a poem-- you are unhappy with this."

 Feuilly is in fact making a disgusted face. "A _poem_?"

 "Perhaps something in hexameter. An epic."

 Feuilly makes a faux-gagging noise. "Let's see how you like it: shall I compare thee to a mechanical Turk? Thou art more lovely than a printing press..."

 "That is not fair; those are technological objects, and have no beauty in them!"

 "Rough gears do grind within clockwork--"

 Prouvaire grabs for a cushion off the sopha, and throws it awkwardly at him. Feuilly, eschewing his chair, dives for the floorboards, noiseless with laughter. The cushion catches him full in the face, despite his efforts, and-- flush with triumph-- Prouvaire hurls another. "There," he announces with satisfaction. "The day is mine. And the night, too, if you would like to stay; for look-- the sun is nearly down, and we have not even begun Greek. By which I mean the language, lest we be unclear."

 "This orgy you propose is unconventional." 

 It is difficult to take Feuilly seriously when he was lying on the floor, head propped on one hand.

 "Convention," Prouvaire says, "is ever my enemy."

 He goes to close the curtains and light the candles. A plant on the windowsill, he sees, has begun growing towards the sun in a most unusual fashion, winding its whole body leftwards single-mindedly. Despite the strangeness of this tactic, its vines are replenishing their leaves; small white flowers are unbudding bravely. Prouvaire touches them, wondering. How do they live; how do they survive, here in the city? Has beauty its own kind of mandate, that pushes forwards, no matter how inhospitable the place? He wants to think so. He wants to believe this. He listens to Feuilly, behind him, whistling: a long low phrase from a Chopin etude that Feuilly will not admit that he likes, and he thinks: surely this is true; what is beautiful survives; for creatures such as us there is a special grace. All they must do is go on being beautiful-- in Feuilly's way of thinking, till next week and next week and next week, until someday they will look up and see it is the future, come upon them as subtly as night washes over a day. Then, he thinks, we will be serious people; then we will understand all things; that will be the era of revelation-- but tonight he closes the curtains, and accepts imperfection, and continues to strive towards his small beauty.

 

**Author's Note:**

> I have significantly blurred a couple of things here, notably the question of how old the characters would have been in 1826, and also the history and categorization of the passe defini in French. 
> 
> Prouvaire is an Orientalist here in ways I strongly don't approve of; this extends to his very haphazard retelling of the "The Conference of the Birds," a poem by the Persian Sufi poet Attar.
> 
> Prince Henry of Prussia was the architect of the first partition of Poland; Villele was the royalist prime minister at this time, under Charles X.
> 
> I've just arbitrarily decided to make Prouvaire from Provence, for really no reason.


End file.
